Ristorante Rinaldi al Quirinale , Roma, Italy

We were sent to try this Restaurant by some American friends of ours. Having been to Roma hundreds of times I am always a little reluctant to try recommendations from infrequent visitors but these were people who do travel a lot and know good food. Please be advised there are many places in Roma to eat however there are a lot of tourist traps with bad food.

Fish was exceptionally fresh and service excellent. For an antipasto we had the fish assortment it was excellent, pasta was homemade with a nice pink seafood sauce and the secondi of grilled seafood (sea bass and prawns) was also great. We had a side order of Puntarelle it’s a Roma specialty which was to excellent. The house complimentary dessert of  dough with powdered sugar cookies was excellent so I recommend stopping there, the 4 cake assortment looked great but did not taste as good as it looked.

The waiter was a little pushy towards expensive items on the menu and the wine was unreasonably high priced ( a 7 Euro bottle for 40 euro which I had at another ristorante for 20 later on the same trip, not that I’m opposed to paying 40 euro for wine it’s just the value that bothers me a bit).We had a good time and don’t regret going however I don’t think I would return. Although there was a good number of Italians’ I don’t believe they were locals. It’s a shame this would have been a great find if they did not have a tendency towards taking advantage of tourists. Lori on the other hand feels I’m being a little harsh and the fresh fish is worth a return.

Ivan Klugman : The Photo Gourmet

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One Comment

  1. We were charged 12 Euro for the bread basket. 14 Euro for leftover greens that we did not order. Charged twice for a shared dish. And 8 euro a bottle more for the wine than the menu price. In total we were charge 60 Euro extra — after hasseling with the staff for 10 minutes after recieving the bill and getting a 20 Euro reduction.